by Bear Grylls
‘I had no option but to sink, swim or get eaten. I chose to specialise in remote-area and high-risk filming. But it’s a hand-to-mouth existence. Totally. Kral could afford to run at the first sign of trouble. I can’t. Not if I want to prove the naysayers – my father – wrong.
‘High-risk adventure filming – it’s what I do. If I quit when it gets too lively, what do I have? Nothing.’ Dale fixed Jaeger with a very direct look. ‘So screw Kral, with his resentment and his envy. But truth be told – I’m shitting myself out here’
De-leeching done, Jaeger volunteered to cover Dale’s watch duties so he could get a full night’s rest. For once, the Australian agreed to the offer of help. Somehow it seemed to signal that the most unlikely of friendships was being forged between the two of them.
As he sat his first sentry, staring into the night-dark forest, Jaeger found himself wondering if he’d misjudged the man. Dale had an independent, maverick streak and a think-outside- the-box mentality – the kind of qualities that Jaeger had valued in his men when in the military.
Had they travelled different life paths, it was just conceivable that Jaeger might have ended up as the war cameraman, and Dale the elite forces warrior.
More than most, Jaeger knew how a man’s destiny could turn on a dime.
65
When Jaeger was relieved of his watch duty, he found that someone else around the camp was still awake – Leticia Santos.
He wandered over, figuring he’d remind her to check for leeches. Santos was already on top of the problem, and she found his obvious discomfort – especially when he suggested she might want to check her female parts – highly amusing.
‘Eight years with B-SOB, five with FUNAI,’ she reminded him. ‘I’ve grown used to checking around those areas!’
Jaeger smiled. ‘That’s a relief. So why the move?’ he asked, crouching down beside her. ‘From hunting bad guys to saving Indians?’
‘Two reasons,’ Santos replied. ‘First, I realised we can’t stop the narco gangs unless we protect the jungle. It’s where they run their drugs and where they hide. And to do that we need the help of the Amazonian tribes. Brazilian law says that their lands – their forest home – have to be protected. So, if we can contact and safeguard the Indians, it’s also the key to saving the Amazon.’
She eyed Jaeger. ‘If this was your country and you possessed this great wonder – the Amazon rainforest – would you not also want to safeguard it?’
‘Of course. And the second reason?’ Jaeger prompted.
‘I lost my marriage due to my work with B-SOB,’ Santos answered quietly. ‘A career in special ops is never a recipe for a long and happy marriage, no? Always on call. So many secrets. Never able to plan anything. So many cancelled holidays, birthdays, anniversaries. My husband complained I was never there for him.’ She paused. ‘I don’t want my daughter to grow up and level the same accusation at me.’
Jaeger nodded. ‘I get that. I left the military shortly after I started a family. But it’s a tough one, for sure.’
Santos glanced at Jaeger’s left hand; the only adornment was a single gold band. ‘You are married, yes? And with children?’
‘I am. One son. Though . . . Well, it’s a long story.’ Jaeger stared off into the brooding jungle. ‘Put it this way – they’re lost to me . . .’ His words petered out to nothing.
Santos reached out and placed a hand on his arm. Her eyes searched his face with undisguised warmth. ‘To be alone is hard. If you ever need a friendly ear – you know you can count on me.’
Jaeger thanked her. He got to his feet. ‘We need to get some rest. Dorme bem, Leticia. Sweet dreams.’
Jaeger awoke hours later, a sweaty bundle of screaming.
His hammock was swinging wildly to and fro, from where he’d been thrashing about, fighting the monsters that so often seemed to assail him in his dreams.
It had been a repeat of the nightmare – the one he’d last had in his Wardour Castle apartment. Again it had taken him up to the very moment of his wife and child being snatched away from him – and then an impenetrable wall had crashed down.
He gazed around: the darkness was so complete that he could barely see his hand in front of his face. Then he heard it: movement. Someone – or something – was creeping through the thick bush.
His hand slipped out of the hammock and felt for his combat shotgun.
A voice came to him from the darkness. ‘It is Puruwehua. I heard you screaming.’
Jaeger relaxed.
In a way, he wasn’t surprised that his cries had woken the Indian. Puruwehua had slung his hammock adjacent to his own. And far better him than some of the others – for Jaeger trusted the Amahuaca warrior just about as much as he trusted anyone right now.
Puruwehua squatted beside him. ‘The lost memories – they are in there, Koty’ar,’ he remarked quietly. ‘You just need to allow yourself to unlock them; to go there.’
Jaeger stared into the darkness. ‘Every returning soldier and failed father has nightmares.’
‘Still, you carry much darkness,’ Puruwehua told him. ‘Much pain.’
Silence for a long second.
‘You have light?’ Puruwehua prompted.
Jaeger switched on his head torch, keeping it shielded inside the hammock so that it cast a faint greenish glow. Puruwehua handed him a cup, brimful with liquid. ‘Drink this. A jungle remedy. It will help you.’
Jaeger took the cup and thanked him. ‘I’m sorry to have woken you, my warrior friend. Let’s rest, and be ready for tomorrow.’
With that he drained the contents dry. But the calm he was expecting never came.
Instead, he felt an immediate burst of pain to the inside of his skull, as though someone had kicked him hard in the eye socket. Moments later, his senses started to fail. He felt hands holding him down, and Puruwehua’s distinctive voice murmuring soothing words in his Amahuaca dialect.
Then, quite suddenly, the insides of Jaeger’s eyelids seemed to explode into a kaleidoscope of colours, fading gradually into a bright yellow canvas.
The image intensified and became clearer. Jaeger was lying on his back in a tent, two sleeping bags zipped together, warm and cosy with his wife and child beside him. But something had woken him, pulling him out of a deep sleep into the cold reality of a Welsh winter.
His head torch played across the yellow canvas above as he tried to zero in on the disturbance and the threat. All of a sudden, a long blade came thrusting through the tent’s thin side. As Jaeger went to react, fighting his way out of the constrictions of the sleeping bag, there was a hiss from a nozzle thrust through the opening.
Thick gas filled the tent, knocking Jaeger backwards and freezing his limbs. He saw hands reach in, dark faces clad in respirators above them, and moments later his wife and child were dragged out of the warmth and into the darkness.
They couldn’t even scream, for the gas had incapacitated them as much as it had Jaeger. He was helpless; helpless to defend himself, or, more importantly, his wife and child.
He heard the snarl of a powerful engine; the cry of voices, the slamming of doors, as something – someone – was dragged towards a vehicle. With a superhuman force of will he made himself crawl towards the knife slash in the tent. He thrust his head outside.
He caught barely a glimpse, but it was enough. In the glare of headlights reflecting off a dusting of frost and snow he saw two figures – one slight and boyish; the other lithe and female – bundled into the rear of a 4x4.
The next moment, Jaeger was grabbed by the roots of his hair. His head was forced upwards, so that he was staring through the glass eyelets of a gas mask into hate-filled eyes. A gloved fist hammered out of the darkness with massive force, slamming into Jaeger’s face once, twice, three times, blood from his broken nose spattering across the snow.
‘Take a good long look,’ the face behind the mask hissed, as he twisted Jaeger savagely towards the 4x4. The words were muffled, but still he caught
their meaning, the voice somehow sounding chillingly familiar. ‘Get this moment burned into your brain. Your wife and child – they’re ours.’
The mask bent lower, so the front of the respirator was pressing into Jaeger’s bloodied features. ‘Don’t ever forget – you failed to protect your wife and child. Wir sind die Zukunft!’
The eyes were wide behind the glass eyelets, pumped with adrenalin, and it struck Jaeger that he knew the face behind that manic gaze. He knew it, yet at the same time he didn’t know it, for he couldn’t put a name to those hate-twisted features. Moments later the horrific scene – the unspeakable memories – faded, but not before one image had lodged in Jaeger’s mind irrevocably . . .
When finally he came back to his senses in his hammock, Jaeger was feeling utterly drained. The most abiding image of the attack hadn’t exactly surprised him. In his heart he’d been expecting it; dreading it. He’d feared it was there, embedded in the darkness of that snow-washed Welsh hillside.
Etched into the hilt of the knife that had sliced through the tent was a dark iconic image: a Reichsadler.
66
Puruwehua kept a vigil besides Jaeger’s hammock all through the lonely night hours. He alone understood what Jaeger was going through. The drink he’d given him was laced with nyakwana, the key to unlocking so many powerful images buried deep in the mind. He knew the white man would be shaken to his very core.
At dawn, neither spoke about what had happened. Somehow it didn’t need words.
But the whole of that morning Jaeger was moody and withdrawn, trapped inside the shell of the memories that had resurfaced. Physically, he set one foot in front of the other as he trekked through the damp and dripping jungle, but mentally he was in an entirely different place, his mind entombed within a shredded tent on an icy Welsh mountainside.
His team couldn’t help but notice his change of mood, though few could fathom the reason. This close to the air wreck – its discovery now within their grasp – they had expected Jaeger to be utterly energised; to be leading the charge. But quite the contrary: he seemed locked in a dark and lonely place that excluded all others.
It was pushing four years ago now when his wife and child had disappeared. Jaeger had been training for the Pen y Fan Challenge – a twenty-four-kilometre race over the Welsh mountains. It was Christmas, and he, Ruth and Luke had decided to spend it in a novel way, camped out in the Welsh foothills. It had been the perfect excuse to be together in the mountains – something that little Luke loved – and for Jaeger to get in some extra training. It was their family adventure combo, as he’d jokingly told Ruth.
They’d set camp near the start of the race. The Pen y Fan Challenge was inspired by British special forces selection. In one of the toughest stages, candidates had to ascend the almost sheer face of the Fan, descend Jacob’s Ladder, then push onwards along the undulating old Roman road, at the end of which they’d hit the turnaround point and do it all again in reverse.
It had become known as ‘the Fan Dance’, and was a brutal test of speed, stamina and fitness – things that Jaeger found came naturally to him. Though retired from the military, he still liked to remind himself every now and then what he was capable of.
They’d gone to sleep that night with Jaeger’s body aching from a hard day’s training, and his wife and son likewise exhausted from mountain-biking across the snowy lowlands. Jaeger’s next conscious memory had been of coming to his senses a week later in intensive care – only to learn that Ruth and Luke were missing.
The gas used against them had been identified as Kolokol-1, a little-known Russian knockout agent that took effect in between one and three seconds. It was generally non-fatal – unless the victim suffered prolonged exposure in a closed environment – but even so it had taken Jaeger months to fully recover.
The police had discovered the boot of Jaeger’s car stuffed full of Christmas presents for his family – ones that would now never be opened. Apart from the 4x4’s tyre tracks, no trace of his missing wife and child had been found. It had appeared to be a motiveless abduction, not to mention possible murder.
While Jaeger wasn’t exactly the prime suspect, at times the line of questioning had left him wondering. The more any motive or leads had evaded the police, the more they had seemed to want to dig for reasons in Jaeger’s past as to why he might have wanted to make his wife and child disappear.
They’d trawled his military records, highlighting any history of extreme trauma that might have triggered post-traumatic stress disorder. Anything that might account for such apparently unaccountable behaviour. They’d questioned his closest friends. Plus they’d grilled his family relentlessly – his parents in particular – about whether there were any problems in his marriage.
That had in part precipitated his mother and father’s move to Bermuda – to escape the unwarranted intrusions. They’d stuck around to help him through the worst, but when he’d gone AWOL and fled to Bioko, they’d likewise seized the chance for a clean start. By then the trail had gone utterly cold anyway. Ruth and Luke had been missing almost a year, presumed dead, and in the relentless search Jaeger had come close to tearing himself apart.
It had taken days, months – and now years – for the hidden recollections of that dark night to start bleeding back to the surface. And now this: he’d reclaimed some of the very last of the memories, those most deeply buried, at the hands of an Amahuaca warrior and a good dose of a nyakwana-infused drink.
Of course, it wasn’t any old Reichsadler that he’d seen on that knife hilt. It was the same design that his great uncle Joe had found so utterly terrifying in a cabin deep in the Scottish hills. His words flashed into Jaeger’s mind now, as he trudged through the sodden jungle, along with the look of sheer terror that had flitted across his gaze.
And then this precious boy comes here with that. Ein Reichsadler! That damn cursed damnation! It seems as if the evil has returned . . .
According to the Amahuaca Indian chief, it was a similar Reichsadler that had been carved into the bodies of his two captured warriors – and by the same force with which Jaeger and his team were locked in a life-and-death struggle.
But what confounded Jaeger most was that he seemed to have recognised the voice spitting at him from behind the gas mask. Yet as much as he might rack his brains, no name or image came into his mind.
If he did somehow know his chief tormentor, the man’s identity remained utterly lost to him.
67
It was approaching midday on their tenth day in the jungle by the time Jaeger had started to shake free of his malaise. It was their impending arrival at the air wreck that had dragged him out of the dark and troubling past.
In spite of that morning’s disquiet, Jaeger still had his pebbles and compass gripped in hand. He figured they were maybe 3,000 yards short of the line at which the forest would start to die. Beyond that it would be only the bleached bones of toxic dead wood leading up to the wreck itself.
They entered a particularly sodden patch of jungle.
‘Yaporuamuhu˜ a,’ Puruwehua announced, as they began to wade deeper. ‘Flooded forest. When the water becomes this big, the piranhas tend to swim in from the rivers. They feed on anything they can find.’
The dark water was swirling around Jaeger’s waist. ‘Thanks for the warning,’ he muttered.
‘They are only aggressive when driven by hunger,’ Puruwehua tried to reassure him. ‘After such rains, there should be plenty for them to eat.’
‘And if they are feeling hungry?’ Jaeger queried.
Puruwehua glanced at the nearest tree. ‘You must get out of the water. Quickly.’
Jaeger spotted something sleek and silvery streaking through the shallows beside him. Another and another darted past, one or two brushing against his legs. The bodies looked silky-green on the dorsal surface, with large yellow eyes turned upwards, and two rows of massive teeth likes spines.
‘They’re all around us,’ Jaeger hissed.
&nbs
p; ‘Not to worry – this is good. This is very good. Andyrapepotiguhu˜ a. Vampire fish. It eats piranhas. It spears them with its long teeth.’
‘Right, let’s keep ’em close – at least until we reach that warplane.’
The water deepened. It was almost at chest height now. ‘Soon time to swim like the pirau’ndia,’ Puruwehua remarked. ‘It is a fish that holds itself vertical, with its head out of the water.’
Jaeger didn’t reply.
He’d had enough of fetid water, mosquitoes, leeches, caimans and fish jaws to last him a lifetime. He wanted to get hooked up to that aircraft, lift himself and his team out of there, and start searching for his missing family.
It was time to finish the expedition and start afresh. At the end of this crazed road he felt certain he’d know his wife and son’s fate one way or the other. Or if not, he’d have died in the attempt to discover it. Living in the half-light as he had been was not living at all. This was what his awakening had shown him.
Jaeger could feel Puruwehua’s eyes upon him as they walked onwards in silence.
‘You have a clearer mind now, my friend?’
Jaeger nodded. ‘Time to wrest back control from those who seek to destroy your world, Puruwehua, and mine.’
‘We call it hama,’ Puruwehua remarked knowingly. ‘Fate or destiny.’
For a while they waded on in companionable silence.
Jaeger felt a presence in the water beside him. It was Irina Narov. Like the rest of his team she was moving ahead holding her main weapon – a Dragunov sniper rifle – high out of the water, in an effort to keep it dirt free and dry. It was backbreaking work, but with the air wreck so close, she seemed driven by a relentless energy.
The Dragunov was an odd choice of weapon for the jungle, where combat was invariably at close quarters, but Narov had insisted it was the weapon for her. Sensibly, she’d opted for an SVDS – the compact, lightweight variant of the gun.
